The 1950s may be known as 'The Golden Age of Television', but my personal golden age of boob tubery came a little bit later. At the age of eight I was transported from a country with three television channels (all of which seemed to spend as much time broadcasting the test card as anything else) to the outskirts of a major American metropolis blessed with more than twenty stations.
In this land of milk and honey the phrase 'Movies Till Dawn' was no idle marketing boast, and yours truly subsequently spent countless hours in front of the goggle box, enjoying and falling asleep to fuzzy black-and-white broadcasts of the widest variety of films imaginable: Hollywood classics, German krimis, Italian pepla, Filipino horror movies, and Yugoslav war epics such as The Battle of Neretva.
The Yugoslav film industry — and its long and close relationship to the President for Life, Josip Broz Tito — is the subject of Cinema Komunisto, a documentary that will be of profound interest to folks with fond memories of The Million Dollar Movie, Bowling for Dollars, and the Non-Aligned Movement.
The film features interview footage with veterans of the industry (including Tito's personal projectionist, who reckons he showed the President 8,800 films over the course of 32 years), generous excerpts from numerous films (including the aforementioned, Academy Award-nominated, and long since forgotten Neretva), and absolutely priceless 'behind the scenes' footage of Tito hobnobbing with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The movies just haven't been the same since the Socialist Federal Republic broke up in 1992.
In this land of milk and honey the phrase 'Movies Till Dawn' was no idle marketing boast, and yours truly subsequently spent countless hours in front of the goggle box, enjoying and falling asleep to fuzzy black-and-white broadcasts of the widest variety of films imaginable: Hollywood classics, German krimis, Italian pepla, Filipino horror movies, and Yugoslav war epics such as The Battle of Neretva.
The Yugoslav film industry — and its long and close relationship to the President for Life, Josip Broz Tito — is the subject of Cinema Komunisto, a documentary that will be of profound interest to folks with fond memories of The Million Dollar Movie, Bowling for Dollars, and the Non-Aligned Movement.
The film features interview footage with veterans of the industry (including Tito's personal projectionist, who reckons he showed the President 8,800 films over the course of 32 years), generous excerpts from numerous films (including the aforementioned, Academy Award-nominated, and long since forgotten Neretva), and absolutely priceless 'behind the scenes' footage of Tito hobnobbing with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The movies just haven't been the same since the Socialist Federal Republic broke up in 1992.
